


You're Prettier in Pieces

by DesdemonaKaylose



Series: Who Looks for Love Through the Eye of a Needle [1]
Category: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Genre: Blood and Gore, Descent into Madness, Eye Trauma, F/M, Implied/Referenced Torture, No Sexual Content, Role Reversal, This is Not My Beautiful House
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-02-23 13:31:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13191132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: In Devi's new house there are rooms and rooms and rooms, and a skittering in the walls that refuses to die.(Or, Devi the Homicidal Maniac)





	1. You May Find Yourself Living in a Shotgun Shack

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me at sauntervaguelydown on tumblr if you want to~

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And you may ask yourself, Well, How Did I Get Here?  
> And you may say to yourself, My God. What Have I Done?

Devi buys groceries. She’s new to the neighborhood, and it’s not a good neighborhood but at least it’s a self-absorbed suburban kind of poverty rather than the desperate grasping meanness of the apartments she’s occupied thus far in her adult life. Her new house is the only thing she can afford with her savings, and it’s a rat’s nest to be quite frank. The floors of the house are pitted grey concrete. There had been a leak in the plumbing a decade before, or something, and the previous owner had never arranged for the floor to be replaced. Looking around at her new house, Devi thinks she can see why. Even the light that falls on her feet as she passes by the window is filthy, miserable and dark. Half the appliances in the kitchen gave up the ghost years before. She spun the dial on the mint-blue oven and a shower of sparks rained down inside the greasy glass pane.

She buys Lysol and bactine and rags and thinks of all its old corners and how tired her elbows are going to be by tomorrow, and ignores the cashier’s advances with gritted teeth. She doesn’t think she is going to make this place a home. She’s too tired for anything that sentimental. She just wants it to be livable.

 

 

Devi does not sleep well. Devi has never been an easy sleeper, but the nights here are the scratch of cheap wool, irritating and clingy. The moonlight that comes in through her windows follows her like the gaze of a malevolent eye. Only when the new moon is swallowed up by the sky does she feel even an ounce of peace, and still, over the glittering powder of the star-strewn darkness, she can feel its spectral eyelid ready to crack open again in a few precious hours. She moves her bed from one end of the room to the other, which does nothing. She buys soothing CDs and chamomile tea, both of which she hates. She boards up the bedroom windows. And then, because it’s so satisfying, she boards up the rest of the windows too. She still does not sleep.

 

 

Her new house has a basement, which she uses to store her easels and canvases. There are rats in the darkness. She is not afraid of rats, but she doesn’t like them either. She lays out rat traps under the old furniture and sheets and she waits, and she waits, and. The traps gather dust. The cheese goes hard and green. Devi stands in the midst of the mess, tapping her foot on the sagging floor, and hears even now the rustling in the walls. Her traps lie where she left them.

 

 

This city oozes little evils into its streets like a garbage bag spilling sickly sweet slime into the gutter. In an alley between the Publishing House and her car, which she has only barely managed to find a spot for after circling the block for a full half hour longer than she planned - after watching the clock tick down until she was already ten minutes late for her meeting before she even left the vehicle - after watching the HR rep smile grimly as he accepted her resume and then promised to give her a call - Devi is in no mood to deal with the petty villains who populate this urban sprawl. She is livid, wound tight, ready to lacerate.

When the thug in the alley backs her up against a corner, Devi does what she learned to do in art school and lashes out - slams the heel of her palm up into his nostrils and crushes his face. She can feel the cartilage crunching against the blow, bone shattering, sinuses collapsing - the whole thing caves in like old fruit, and she’s left heaving with the aftermath of adrenaline as he gurgles and twitches on the pavement. Her heel scrapes the ground as she takes a step back, garbage oil and blood dragging in her wake.

She watches his eyes roll back into his head and she thinks - should I be strong enough to do that?

 

 

Devi paints, and she paints, and when she runs out of canvas she just tears bookshelves from the walls and starts painting there, desperate to drain the thing in her head into ink. She can't stop or she'll lose the momentum, she can feel something dragging at the inside of her head, like it's waiting for a place to dig its claws in and choke her down to an art block. She doesn't give it purchase. She paints into the night, which she doesn't sleep through anyway, and into the heavy-eyed weight of the day. Still-lifes become swollen portraits become howling surrealist landscapes and still she goes, she paints her bedroom walls with unblinking dripping eyes, she paints the doors with visions of some sublime hellmouth that comes to her stroke by stroke, block by block. She is pouring out something that will kill her if she tries to keep it caged.

There is a trap door in her basement floor. She descends into the darkness like Hecate carrying her torch into the underworld, flashlight squeezed tight in her hand.

 

 

On the street men jeer and call to her, licking their beer-slick lips. Devi doesn’t know how to be quiet and keep her head down. When the world pushes on her, she pushes back.

 

 

Devi covers the walls in grappling monsters and childhood nightmares, working through the night and into the indistinguishable day, closed inside of her boarded windows and buried underneath the earth. She hasn’t taken a job in weeks. Maybe more. She forgets to pay the electricity but the lights stay on, she forgets to pay the water but the water keeps coming. She buys cheap food. She’s never eaten much anyway.

 

 

Devi wrenches her sticky fist free of a stranger’s eye socket and stands, wobbling, under the light of the Seven-Eleven fluorescents. Fluid drips down her knuckles. Did she do that?

 

 

Tenna runs into her as she’s picking up a new work shirt from the mall, and she’s a whirl of enthusiasm as she leads Devi over to the noodle kiosk and buys her a bowl and berates her for never answering her phone, honestly Devi I know you get tunnel vision when you’re working but you couldn’t spare one minute for your old pal Tenna?

Devi doesn’t know what to say - she can’t remember the last time she heard the phone ring. Has the message light been blinking at her this whole time? How long has it been since she checked her messages? Devi slurps noodles from her Styrofoam bowl uneasily. _Sorry,_ she says. _It's been a weird few weeks._

 _It’s been six months_ , Tenna says, a hint of accusation finally slipping through her forced cheer, _I was starting to think you died or something._

 

 

Devi watches the man who just cooked her dinner claw at his own throat, eyes bulging. The trachea is collapsed. No matter how hard he sucks, no air will be getting through that ruined pipe. Like a collar, the skin around his neck blooms red and purple in the shape of her fingers. Why do men always disappoint her? She really isn't asking much, some conversation, maybe a movie, a little common decency, at the very least not to put a hand up her shirt while she's trying to eat her _fucking_ shrimp puffs. 

He claws madly, tearing himself open, and Devi imagines that she can see the red and purple veins tearing underneath his greedy fingers. He should have kept his hands to himself. She wipes her hand on her thigh and pops another shrimp puff into her mouth.

 

 

Devi meets a guy at the art store on her side of town, the new cashier, sharp like a knife in every sense of the metaphor, from his cutting cheekbones to his gloved fingers to his dry, relentless commentary. He says it’s the only job he can get with half an art degree. He throws in a couple texture sponges for free and tells her that when he burns this place to the ground he’ll be sure to grab a box of copics for her. For a moment, the static in her head goes dizzyingly silent. 

 

 

The basement only seems to go deeper and deeper. Each time she searches for a trap door she finds one, stairs and endless stairs, deep enough into the earth that she cannot help but know that she is lost in the stomach of some primeval behemoth, some gravedirt angler fish, navigating its hungry intestines.

On the lower floors she finds lurking rust-spotted contraptions, mechanisms out of a nightmare. They lie unused in the darkness, dreaming of some forgotten inquisition, leaping beneath her hands like they know her touch and long for the life she can breathe back into them. Do they remember her? Are they hers? Gritty red flakes splinter and drift under her fingers. Devi looks up from her work to find that she no longer knows how she came to live here.

 

 

Devi observes a moving truck through a crack in the slatted window. Neighbors. Nothing good comes of neighbors. Walking around on her lawn, trying to look in her windows. Watching her house. Nothing good.

 

 

Devi pushes her hair off her sweat-slicked forehead, smearing tacky blood all over herself. When did her hair get this long? She pauses in the middle of wrenching a man’s teeth out of his jaw and goes to find some scissors, she knows she has some scissors, maybe she left them with the barista in the other room.

 

 

Sweltering in the afternoon sunshine, Devi offers the husband a glass of lemonade with dust all muddied down at the bottom. His wife sags listless against the moving truck, glassy eyes and withered limbs. Nothing good comes of neighbors. Even now her skin is crawling at the thought of them watching her, monitoring her, with their inscrutable human desires.

The husband is bent over the trunk of their car, scrounging in the junk for the CD he says would have made him a rock star _if it wasn’t for the little snot_ , and Devi is reaching out for his neck, for the column of vertebrae that will snap like a wishbone under her hand - when the kid wanders out of the house. Their eyes meet. He has these big watery eyes, these little-red-riding-hood eyes, clutching his teddy bear to his tiny chest. For a half second the two of them freeze in place, watching each other. She can almost hear his heart slamming frantic against his ribs. His huge watery eyes are reflecting her nightmare shape back at her, the monster that will haunt his sleep for weeks after this moment is over, the inhuman inscrutable thing that holds his entire life in her paint-stained palms.

Slowly, she lowers her hand. Not today, she decides. Another day, perhaps.

 

 

When the paintings start to talk back to her, Devi only talks over them. 

 

 

It is an angel, she thinks, but it is also the sound of a jaw snapping closed around a rabbit's neck, the void between stars that slavers insatiably for heat and light, the way that a tree grows from the socket of a decomposing skull. This is it, this is the thing that all her work has been bringing her towards: a magnum opus, a scream into the sunless terror of existence. 

It is a room, just a room in a house somewhere in the world, but it is draining everything she is into its sodden corners. The walls are a rotting fresco of brains and oil paint, and she cannot stop adding to them. She cannot stop. She doesn’t know why, but it’s imperative - it’s dire - that she not stop. It isn’t finished, she tells herself. I’ve just got to finish it.

 

 

Sickness comes pouring out of her like vomit, like a still birth. Sickness climbs the walls and watches her from the shadows, slitted screwhead eyes, and Sickness laughs like the clicking of an insect. _you cannot keep me here_ _mother,_ It says, _i will not remain within you_

It screams and tears at her as she grabs it, knife-sharp and terrified of her - it should be, yes, it should be - as she squeezes it back down into the canvas. The sound is like a swarm of insects, like a fire popping. Devi pinches its tiny head between her fingers and feels the fragile nothing threaten to split open. Limb by straining limb, she forces the vicious little thing into the paint, until it is nothing but oil glaring up at her, wounded and reduced. 

 _Don't forget who made you_ , Devi says, drawing back her blue-smeared hand.  _You're mine, you wretched little monster. You picked this planet to colonize, and you can't escape its gravity now._

The hungry walls scream at her, another monstrous ungrateful child.  

 

 

They sit on his car on the cliff over the city and watch the stars through the smog, a purple and white world rendered clean and lovely in the darkness. _It all looks so beautiful from up here,_ she says, her hands warm against the rust-spotted metal. He frowns up at the sky, dark circled eyes and bitter thin lips. _A beautiful rotten lie,_ he says. _It's all held together with string and spit._

She watches him and he watches the horizon, the mountains that are only black cut-outs against the cancerous sky. _It's only pretty when you can squint at it,_ he says. _A collage of ugliness rendered beautiful by distance._

 _I wonder what starts to happen when it falls apart,_ she says.

Devi waits for him to let her down, like all the others. She waits, and she waits, and she waits.

 

 

 _I’m glad I asked you_ , she says, and she leans in. She leans in to meet him half way with his parted lips and his wide eyes, and - he pulls away, ducking down into the cage of his skinny arms, breathing hard. _I’m sorry,_ he says, _I’m sorry, you’re so - relentlessly magnificent and I’m just - I -_

The walls are whispering to her, all the painted white mouths and fresco teeth in a hissing chorus, telling her how sweet he is, how naïve, how precious. _Your work_ , the walls hiss, _think of your work. How will you work with this sweet lovely thing distracting you? Dragging you away from the house? Taking you away from your work?_

Devi watches her own knuckles bend and crack as if they belong to someone else. There is only the work, and what is she if she is not working? There is nothing else of her left.

 _Kill him,_ the walls whisper, _kill him like the others. They’re all prettier in pieces_.

 

 

The glass in the mirror shatters as his head cracks into it, a fracture that blinks back at her with a menagerie of endless eyes, her own eyes. There is still enough give for breath to whistle in and out of his throat, and he could at least try to pry her loose right now, if he had half a mind to. He could take a swing at her. He doesn't. She can feel his pulse in her hand, the wild rabbit thump. She could break him with a twitch, all his hollow bird bones and razor edges. She never holds them like this, never this closely, never long enough to hear their rabbit fast hearts in her palm.

 _I could keep him,_ she thinks. _I could keep him. Just until he disappoints me._

He licks his lips, nervous tick, and he says, _So you - you weren’t joking about the murder stuff I guess._ His hand trembles, but it settles over her wrist, just lightly enough that she almost can’t feel it. _You should know t_ _his isn’t necessarily a deal breaker. For me._

The walls howl. They seem to throb all around her, stretching and writhing, reaching for her. Devi hooks her fingers inside of his mouth to hold it open and silent, watching the thick heave of his throat from the inside as he swallows. She could break him. She could keep him. She could tear him open.

Devi is a screaming manic ragged collection of compulsions, the trigger and the finger itching on the trigger, and the only thing left of her now is her _want_  and her _resentment_. She hunches her back against the howling of the walls. Let them howl! She knows what she wants! She’ll have what she wants and this child that suckers at her fingers and screams for her attention can eat its gruesome oily heart out. 

Devi looks down at the hand on her wrist, the bony fingers, fraying gloves. The pale knuckles almost look swollen against the spun-glass thinness of the bones.

They all look prettier in pieces. Bite sized. Manageable. Johnny has been sweet so far, but even he is ugly up close, a collage of blemishes held together with string. The difference is only that _his_ ugly interests her. Endears her. Why can’t people be like paintings? Malleable? Perfectible? There is only the work and there is only the work and so she’ll keep him. She’ll keep him.

The knuckles first, she decides. The knuckles first, and then the eyes. 

 

 

 When Tess wakes up in the darkness her shoulders already ache from the suspension hook. She makes her first mistake because the light is terrible, and because she never got a good look at her abductor in the parking lot. Dillon groans feebly next to her. The figure perched on the work table across the room is half gargoyle, half scarecrow, barely distinguishable from the dark.

 _you,_ she says, with her mouth dry as a bar of soap, _who are you_

The figure tilts its head, ear up like an animal trying to pick out a sound. It sends shivers down her spine. _Johnny_ , it says. It waves a hand in a gross approximation of a formal bow, the outline of the appendage stubbed and strange. _But seeing as we're currently sharing this lovely domicile, you can call me Nny._

This is when Tess makes her second mistake.


	2. Down in the Underground

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [it's only forever/not long at all](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVD-X0eqB2w)

When Tess wakes up in the darkness her shoulders are already aching from the suspension hook. She makes her first mistake because the light is terrible, and because she never got a good look at her abductor in the parking lot. Dillon groans feebly next to her. The figure perched on the work table across the room is half gargoyle, half scarecrow, barely distinguishable from the misshapen gloom.

 _you,_ she says, with her mouth dry as a bar of soap, _who are you_

The figure tilts its head, ear up like an animal trying to pick out a sound. It sends shivers down her spine. _Johnny_ , it says. It waves a hand in a gross approximation of a formal bow, the outline of the appendage strange and uncanny. _But seeing as we're currently sharing this lovely domicile, you can call me Nny._

This is when Tess makes her second mistake. _Let us go_ , she says,  _please, my boyfriend - he's really fucked up, he needs a doctor -_

The creature, Nny, giggles in a way that sets her teeth on edge, high pitched and hoarse and hiccupping. 

 _Oh,_ he says,  _now that's not up to me._

 

  

Hours later, Tess is still trying to negotiate with the ghoulish thing that lives down here. Her indeterminable efforts go by in a slurry of restless boredom and relentless begging. She's promised him everything she can think of - medical attention, favors, cash. _Money_ , she says, _if you want money, look, that's something we can talk about. I have cash. I can get cash_.

Nny cackles, swinging his heels against the counter like a little kid. He claps his bandaged hands together, a mummy soft _pat pat pat_ that doesn't at all reflect his gleeful enthusiasm.

 _Okay,_ she says, because she kind of saw that coming. She's growing more accustomed to the gloom, and for the last hour she's been regarding the mismatched darkness of his eyes with growing unease. She doesn't know what he wants or even whether he's the one responsible for their capture - _he_ certainly doesn't think so, she doesn't know what to think - but she is pretty sure he's left the real world a long time behind. She grimaces.

 _I could,_ she says, slowly, _do something else for you. If that's what it takes. We could-_

Nny's heels slam back into the table and go still. _Don't fucking offer me that,_ he snarls, _I don't want that_ _._

Tess pulls back, or tries to at least. Now he sounds angry. She should be afraid, but that's the first thing he's said to her that didn't sound like a delirious fever dream.

 _Weak, needy bodies,_ he says, _satisfy them and they only demand more. Eat a burger and you'll just be hungry again an hour later. These animal desires have to be contained, squashed, eliminated. I want nothing of the flesh!_

Tess blinks at him. _You don't eat?_

 _When I want to,_ Nny says, _only when I want to._

 _And you don't want to_ , Tess says.

 _No_ , he says. _No, feed them and they grow stronger. Starve them and own them. The world is full of parasites, shareholders and beggars and worms that lay eggs in your leg meats! Would-be lovers and hard dicked bosses who all want to fuck you some sort of way, and your own crawling, whining flesh! Biological imperative! Ticking clocks! Hunger pains! Three AM food poisoning vomit!_

Dillon twitches beside her, startling her out of something that felt dark and endless and now, shattered, feels as unreachable as a dream. Maybe Nny isn't the one who is starting to talk sense. Maybe she's the one who's slipped into nonsense. She shakes her head and says, businesslike again,  _Then what_ do _you want?_

Nny pauses. His shape lifts a hand, turning over the bandaged palm.  _I only want one thing,_ Nny says, _and you, my dear, cannot give it to me._

 

 

 

Devi introduces herself in a splatter of fresh blood and greasy hair, green pigment crusted and forgotten over her cheek. In the sudden searing clarity of the electric lights, Tess mistakes her for a nightmare vision - her gorgeous green eyes and her rangy wildcat musculature, her gaze that seems to pass right through Tess. She comes in through the far door and starts rummaging through the junk on the work table, some of which has the withered leathery look of horror movie props. She's muttering to herself.

 _H-hello?_ Tess says. _Are you - can you help us?_

The woman pauses. She turns her head snap fast, and now her eyes burn holes in Tess, narrow and jade pale. _Help you?_ she says. She scoffs, turning back to her work. _I can't even help myself._

Tess tries for the soft even tones of a horse trainer, remembering the ranch in Colorado where she spent a summer once, helping an aunt get her affairs in order. _Who are you?_ she says. _What's your name?_

Now the woman turns her whole body, arms crossed tight over her chest. She looks at Tess as if _Tess_ is the one who may or may not be a hallucination, her every angle withdrawn and suspicious. _Devi,_ she says.

 _Good, that's good,_ Tess says. _I'm Tess. What's your last name, Devi?_

A storm cloud breaks across Devi's hawkish features, brows knitting over her wrinkled nose. _It was a D,_ she says. _It started with a D. I know it did..._

 

 

Tess has a pack of unopened M&Ms in her pocket from the movie theater. She's not actually hungry, but it irritates the hell out of her that they're just sitting there where she can't get to them, when she paid those jacked up movie theater prices for them and everything.

 

 

Devi flicks the light on, bringing sun into the underground. Tess blinks against it. With an economical, purposeful stride, Devi crosses the floor, rips open Dillon's crusty shirt, and plunges metal into the gap between his ribs. Tess is too stunned to vomit. It's a little spout-mouthed plug, the kind that you can buy for the tops of your artesian olive oil jars, and from the tip rolls a slow drip drip drip of Dillon's blood. Devi uncorks a vial with her teeth and shoves it under the tap, ignoring the splashes of red that have already run off the toes of her shoes and onto the stone floor.

 _What the hell are you doing?_ Tess says.

 _It won't dry true,_ Devi says, _I need fresher pigment_.

The drip drip drip turns into a river, blood so red it's almost black, so black it's almost orange. _You're painting with it?_ Tess says, as her stomach drops like a stone. She's been thinking of Devi as a victim too, someone who could be turned - maybe the wife of her captor, or a prisoner as well, someone who's been here longer and might know the way out. But the careless way that Devi handles the vial, the vicious way she punched that tap into Dillon's chest, this doesn't feel like any of those things. This feels like business.

Devi pops the cork into the tap, which doesn't so much stop the flow as reduce it back to a dribble. She holds her vial up to the light, thick fluid casting a shadow across her face. Her beauty mark reminds Tess of an old school pageant queen. Her green eyes remind Tess of Cathedrals. _Did you know,_ she says, absently, _that they used to grind up mummies for paint? It made the most incredible flesh color - smooth murky purples - red like you've never seen-_

She closes her fist around the glass, which looks like old kitchenware. Her fingers are discolored like the wild rainbow of a bruise, but in the creases there are colors no human body should ever turn. The remains of old paint, clinging to her skin like gangrene.

 _One day I'll run out of things to grind,_ she says, eyes fixed on her closed fist. _Then I guess_ _I'll grind myself up and paint myself away_ _._

 _Devi_ , Tess says, _Devi, can you let us down? That thing in Dillon's chest is going to kill him if we don't do something_.

 _No it won't,_ Devi says, voice hard and certain as stone. She looks up, looks at Tess for the first time since she arrived, and she says, _but I will._

 

 

 _Who is Devi?_   Tess asks Nny, the next time he passes through in the dark. He's wandering, as if in a daze, but when he hears that name his spine snaps straight like a whipcrack.

 _Devi,_ he says, _the beginning and the end,_ _Hindu mother goddess, goddess of destruction. Raper and redeemer._

 _No,_ Tess says, already exhausted with this conversation. _I mean the woman who comes through here sometimes._

 _So do I,_ Nny says, showing his teeth. The hairs on the back of Tess's neck raise. 

_Is this her house?_

_Oh, I think she_ thinks _it is. But who really owns the body, though, the mind piloting it or the worm eating it?_

Tess has no idea what that means. All she knows is that she's been here for too long and she's running out of options, and she _still_ doesn't understand anything.  _Are you a prisoner too?_ she asks.  _Like me?_

Nny hums thoughtfully.  _Yes and no,_ he says. He paces the length of the room, boots clicking steel-toed on the stone. As he passes, closer now, she can make out for the first time how his right eye socket sits hollow, black and scooped out like a crater in the earth. It shouldn't be possible, she thinks. You shouldn't be able to live like that. _He_ shouldn't be able to live like that. _She hasn't taken anything from you_ , Nny says, boots going tap tap past her, _not yet._ _In a way you're freer than I am._

Tess cannot look away from his hollow eye, popped free and clean like a lobotomy gone wrong. _What did she take from you?_

But all Nny holds up is his hand, and against the empty air she can see that his fingers are all cut short at the knuckle, not naturally gnarled as she had once thought. The bandages are splotched with darkness. There's something pathetic and gruesome about it - Tess thinks of doorknobs and can openers and she thinks of _Misery_ , the slow whittling away of a person to make a thing.

 _She took my fingers,_ he says _._

 

 

Tess spent an unremarkable and unpleasant childhood on a series of military bases, starting with the one in Germany where she could not get any of the cartoons the other kids were watching back in the states and thus returned to her home country a social pariah at the ripe old age of nine. In her adolescence she chased a series of beautiful girls who each seemed to promise her something secret and regal with their silent, smirking lips. She started dating Dillon because he was in a band, and because it made things easier to get a foot in the door in the circles she was forever trying to access. She went to a movie. It should have just been a movie. How were they supposed to know that the woman in the row behind them would be the end of everything?

 _It's crazy how easy they break,_ Devi says, holding Dillon's swollen arm between her hands. The tap in his shoulder oozes. Dillon whimpers, fuzzy vacant eyes fixed on nothing.  _All that machismo and their bones still snap right in half just like any woman's. You wanna give it a try?_

Tess gives her a slow, suspicious nod. If she can get her arms free she can make a break for it. If this bitch is crazy enough to let her down - 

 _No you don't,_ Devi says, her smile wiped away like so much chalk. _You still think you're going to get him out of here in one piece._ She drops Dillon's arm like it's something putrid and cumbersome. _You think he's gonna thank you for it, don't you?_

 

 

 _I feel like it's been weeks,_ Tess says, slumping into the unforgiving grip of the hook. _I should be delirious with dehydration by now._

 _Welcome to the nightmare liminal space,_ Nny says. He shoves a handful of cheese poofs into his mouth and holds out the bag, shaking it with greasy fingers. _Want one?_

 

 

 _The trees where they get the yellow for oil color come from a Vietnamese killing field,_ Devi says, as she jerks a tourniquet tight around Dillon's severed elbow. The sounds coming out of his mouth are more irritating than horrifying to Tess, who has always been pretty fast to acclimate to a new environment. She's adaptable. _I read about it in a magazine, somewhere. They still find bullets in the sap._

Devi talks to her in an offhand sort of way, casual, the way you talk to a cashier at a familiar café. It's not intimate but it's piercing, it's like the harsh blast of the light turning on. She takes Tess's interest for granted. Still, Tess isn't sure whether it would be better or worse if Devi looked at her again, the way she did the first time - Tess isn't sure if she could take the radiation blast of those green eyes without being reduced to a charcoal blasted skeleton.

 _Cool?_ Tess ventures, when the silence runs on too long.

 _I don't think so,_ Devi says. _I think it's fucked._ _But what can you do? Horror produces beauty. All beauty is death, and decay - plundered tombs - Art eats genocide like a carrion bird._

She pats Dillon on his shoulder, where the forgotten tap sprouts like a gargoyle's mouth.

 _Art is a fucking monster,_ she says.

 

 

Nny stumbles into the room like a man drunk on blood loss, clinging to the door frame. His stubbed fingers paw at the wall switch blindly, until the room is washed in sudden flickering light. He hip checks the table - old bottles and bits of work projects and tools all jump and clatter, something crashes to the floor. He tears at his bandages with his teeth, too frantic to make much progress. _Nny,_ Tess says, _Nny, what are you -_

She hears fabric pop and tear. His one eye is wild, the pupil shot. _What would you do if you couldn't do what make you you_ , he hisses, _what would you do if you weren't you?_

 _That's a lot of yous,_ Tess says, uneasy in the face of his hysteria.

Nny is unwrapping his bandages with swift jerks of the neck, so sharp and strange that she is afraid she will hear his bones pop. _She took my fingers,_ he says, _she took them, she took them all._

 _Can't you just leave?_ Tess says, as she watches with growing nausea. _Get out of here. Get help? I know doorknobs are probably a problem for you, but you could work around that._

His laughter is a sob, or maybe his sob is laughter. It's hard to tell. _I was an artist_ , he says, _maybe a starving one, sure, but I was an artist. And she knew - she knew how important it was to me, and then she took it away, merciless creature, siren harpy -_

Loops of his bandages fall around his wrists, clots breaking open as soon as the cloth pops free of the stubs. His docked knuckles start to bubble with fresh blood. How can that be possible though? The way he talks, he's been here even longer than Tess, the ends should be healed by now - or necrotic with infection.

 _She talks about her work,_ he snarls, _her work, her work! I had work too, you know! Fuck!_ He dashes armfuls of trash to the floor and climbs up on the table, to the blank white plaster that stretches over it. He digs his bubbling, dripping knuckles into the wall and smears wild lines across the white. She can see his teeth gritted, his lips pulled back. Lines become curves become stark serpentine shapes, a pair of black holes in something that isn't quite an animal skull, and all the time he's scratching this monster into the wall he's talking to himself.

 _I'm as trapped as a rat in a shoe box_ , he says, _she's buried me alive down here with these fucking corpses to ROT, and I will rot, I'm already going soft in the creamy green middle, I can feel it._  

 

 

Tess thinks of the ranch where she spent a bored, dusty summer; she thinks of the girls down at the goth club that she tries so hard to impress; she thinks of the way Dillon has never hit her but she can see it in his eyes sometimes that he wants to, that someday he will; Tess watches Nny grinding himself down to the raw marrow to draw out his fever madness and wonders if she has ever truly known who she is. Maybe Devi can't take that away from her because it isn't hers to have. In a way she envies Nny his madness. At least he had something to lose.

 

 

 _Do you hear them?_ Devi says, hand pressed to the wall as she stalks through, a hammer swinging in her free hand.  _Rats in the walls._

Tess squints at her, and she says, _I can't hear anything._

 

 

Tess is drowsing in the darkness, in the mindless garble of the mumbling Dillon has started to do at all hours of the day, when she sees them silhouetted in the open doorway. They seem unreal to her, like shadow puppets in a theater, weightless and without meaning. Nny is shouting, spitting, shoulders hunched. Devi reaches out, unaffected, and soothes her hand along his cheek under his hollow socket. Tess watches as his shadow puppet strings snap, as he slumps into her touch, and thinks of the visitation of the Madonna.

Tess blinks heavily. When her eyes grind back open again, they are gone without a trace. That's the thing about living underground. It's so hard to tell when you've been asleep.

 

 

Devi's hammer cracks fine lines in the plaster, but it's not dry wall and it doesn't crumple. It makes a dull, flat thump, the unmistakable sound of metal meeting solid stone. She's breathing hard, hair coming out of her pigtails in sweaty scythes. 

 _Devi there can't possibly be rats in these walls,_ Tess says, watching the effort with her brows knitted in unease. _And anyway, I would have heard them._

 

 

 _I can't stand these fucking new markers,_ Devi says, shaking her head. She's come down to eat lunch with Tess and the groaning lump that now constitutes Dillon.  _You can't get decent saturation with any goddamn one of them._

 _Mine's bigger_ , Dillon says, to no one in particular, _fuck... off...._

Devi gives Tess a pointed eyebrow lift. _You still want me to let him go?_ she asks, taking a bite out of her sandwich. 

 _Yes,_ Tess says, automatically. _Are you gonna do it?_

 _Why do you want him out so bad?_ Devi says, mouth full.  _Even if he wasn't too fucked up to make it past the front door at this point, I can't see what you'd get out of it._

 _He's innocent,_ Tess says, although she's not sure what that really means, or who's keeping track.  _He doesn't deserve this._

 _Who does?_ Devi says with a shrug. She narrows her eyes, fixing one hundred percent of her attention on Tess. It's still a wracking experience to have Devi look at her like that, like she's the only solid thing in an insubstantial world. _If you could trade yourself for him_ , she says. _If I promised to let him go in return for keeping you, would you take that bargain?_

Tess doesn't know what to say. In her heart she knows the answer is no, but she feels like it ought to be yes. _I can't go back without him,_ she says.

 _Why?_ Devi says.

Tess almost says,  _Because he's in a band._ But her mouth opens and closes on dry silence, as she reevaluates her reasons. What does Dillon's being in a band _really_ get her? And Devi, as if she's reading Tess's mind, says,  _Let me put it to you this way. If you went back to your life up there, after everything you've seen, would you still be wasting your time with fuckheads like this?_

 

 

 _When I first came back from overseas_ , she mumbles,  _I had this teacher - she lost her shit every time I mixed up some German with my English. She used to scream... at me..._

 _Bitte sprechen Sie mit mir,_ Nny says. His voice almost shudders with hope, spun glass and delicate, and for a moment she is bitterly sorry that she isn't fluent anymore. It comes to her awkwardly, now, her words lost in the jumble of the ten thousand fucking bones she had to learn for that anatomy class that she ended up dropping anyway. The way Nny is looking at her, like she can shine a light over the darkness for him to walk across, like her voice is the string that stretches through the labyrinth, it cuts her to the bone.

She licks her dry lips, trying to taste the shape of the old words. _Ich... werde versuchen,_ she says, at last. The look on his face is relief so deep it almost seems to be a wound.

 _Do you know Erlkönig?_ he says. His eye glitters like pale liquid in the half-light.

 

  

 _It's my masterpiece_ , Devi says, as she plants a boot in Dillon's chest and rips glittering pink ropes of intestines out of his gaping stomach. There isn't much left of Dillon now. Tess isn't really looking forward to hanging next to an actual corpse for the next indeterminable eternity, but on the other hand the noises he was making were starting to  _really_ drive her up the wall, so it's kind of a mixed bag. 

 _Your masterpiece sounds_ _more like a festering roach trap,_ Tess says, trying to shoulder her glasses back up onto her nose. It's a losing battle. 

 _Well it's not as permanent as some of my other work,_ Devi admits, _but then, what's really permanent in the scheme of things? It just needs upkeep._

 _That's one word for it,_ Tess says, eyeing the loop of organ that still pulses in Devi's hand.

As she works, Devi tells her how The Last Supper started to flake from the wall almost as soon as its paint was dry. The most beloved fresco in the world is the product of half a millennium of crude patchwork, a living act of defiance against inevitable entropy. Da Vinci fucked up the plaster, but the world loved him too much to let it fall apart. It's a good story, maybe, but love doesn't seem to be something in Devi's wheelhouse. Tess asks her what she's trying to accomplish with her scabrous rotting magnum opus, the thing that is swallowing her whole up there, if not _love._ The question brings Devi up short - she looks down into the mess of guts and fluids like a fortune teller trying to read the future in a bird's entrails.

 _I wish you could see it_ , Devi says. She frowns, almost wistful, and then she gives a terrible yank. The last length of soft meat comes tearing out of Dillon with a splash. _If you could see it_ _,_ she says, _y_ _ou would understand it_. _I know you would._

 

 

Tess doesn't know what she is. She's always defined herself by the people she could tally up in her corner, her pokemon pack of friends and acquaintances, her social currency. Down here she has none of that. Down here, she realizes that she's never enjoyed any of that - it's just how she survives. She's wasted so much time on so many petty bastards, and with what to show for it? Not one of them would lift a finger to help her now, even if they knew how to. Out of all the people she's ever tried to build a relationship with, the only one who genuinely seems to respect her is the woman who will inevitably be her death.

 

 

 _Why do you keep Johnny around,_ Tess asks her, because she doesn't dare ask the other question - the mirror question - why am I still here?

Swathed in blood head to toe from some errand on the lower floors, Devi swipes pale streaks from her dripping cheeks. _Even the devil has the company of other devils_ , she replies. _It's true we're monsters, cut off from the world, but on that account aren't we bound even tighter for it?_

Frankenstein, Tess says. _Are you quoting_ Frankenstein _at me?_

Devi grins, and despite the fact that she's splashed and glimmering red like a vision from the pit of hell, it's just the kind of familiar, impish smirk that no child ever smiled on Tess's account. _To be destroyed by something you've created,_ she says, _to give birth to something that will eat you - well, the struggle between creature and creator, isn't that the history of the planet?_

 

 

Tess hears something in the walls.  Now she is alone in the dark, next to the hook where Devi has thoughtfully removed the lump of flesh that used to be her boyfriend. She holds her breath and listens. It's not rats. She doesn't know what it is, but she knows that much. 

 

 

 _What is she doing up there?_ Tess asks. She feels like she can hear sounds through the ceiling, but they're faint and indistinct and she doesn't know what to make of them at all.

Nny cranes his neck backwards, looking at her from the floor where he's thrown his crossed ankles up against the work table.  _Dunno,_ he says.  _It's all coming apart, though. I can hear it in the walls._

 

 

The air tastes different. Where there was garbage sweetness now there is only chemical sharpness, the hairspray smell of something that was never meant to touch your lungs.

 

 

Devi comes as far as the doorway and then stops. She stands there, not quite across the threshold, her expression as cold and distant as the void of space. She lays a hand on the doorframe. Her hair is pulled back neatly, her skin is clean and pale. A bead of cold sweat rolls down Tess's spine. The empty space where Dillon used to hang yawns like a hungry void beside her: a promise, or a warning. Something terrible is about to happen - something final, and Tess knows the only thing it could be - there was only one way this could ever end -

But then Devi steps back, all at once, and disappears into the dark.

 

 

When the ceiling starts to shake, Tess knows something has gone very wrong.

 

 

 _Nny,_ she says, _you've got to let me go. This place is coming apart, we're gonna be buried alive._

He hovers in the doorway, nervous as a rat squinting up into the open sky. He looks like the slightest sound would make him bolt for cover. _Nny_ , she snaps, _what did you come down here for if you're not going to_   _do something? Do something for once in your life! Make a decision!_

 

 

Tess's feet touch the ground for the first time in weeks, and she doesn't stumble the way she thought she would. She takes the stairs two at a time, her footsteps echoing off the cacophony of her footsteps. Nny keeps pace a step behind her, uncharacteristically quiet. His mouth is a grim line. His eye is a black abyss. 

 

 

The upper floors are a horror show. Not one of them is left alive, bodies strewn across furniture and floors like forgotten coats. Tess is a long time past the point of retching at every little gruesome detail, but the absolute devastation - the ruthless decimation - it makes her heart pound and her throat close up like she's on the verge of a panic attack. She stumbles through the mess, following the way the devastations falls away on both sides of those footprints like the red sea parting for Moses. Human beings may not be any great shakes - Tess has worked in retail, she doesn't have a whole lot of sentimentality for her species - but she keeps thinking how that could be her, should be her, she doesn't know why it  _isn't..._

 _You let this happen,_ she wheezes at Nny, as he wraps the pull cord for the trap door around his stumped palm and opens it down to them.  _You didn't do anything!_

He snorts. _I let you go, didn't I?_

Tess clambers up the wooden steps after him, knees of her tights catching and ripping as she goes. _You wouldn't do anything until the whole house started to come apart! You're not getting any fan letters from me!_

He rights himself on the next floor up and peers up into the concave darkness, ear cocked at the silence in that eerie animal way of his, one eye narrow and the other staring hollow. _That's fair,_ he says. His eye glances back at her, something unreadable on his starved features.  _I know I'm not the hero of this story._

 

 

Tess knows immediately when they've reached the Masterpiece. For one thing, she can smell it. 

 

 

When Devi talks about the Masterpiece, she uses terms like _chiaroscuro_ and _skiagraphia_ and _viscerality._ It sure has viscera covered, but as for the rest it's anybody's guess. Tess stands dumbstruck in the middle of the room, looking up into the vision of Hell that stretches across the ceiling and down to the floor like the Sistine Chapel rendered in shades of decay, stark reds and flaking browns against black so murky the room appears to have no corners. It isn't beautiful. It's terrifying. 

 _This is what she's been making?_ Tess says, fighting an instinct to turn and escape back down into the safe, dark catacomb below. 

All around them the vivid starkness of the winding figures seems to move imperceptibly, like the slow uncoiling of a snake in its den. Nny ignores her, stalking past even as she speaks. His shoulders are hunched now, and the way he stalks across the floor gives her a terrible sense of deja vu. She swallows down her disquiet, and for lack of real options, chases after him. 

 

 

 _No!_ Devi shouts, _I'm not finished_ _yet!_

She is incandescent with rage, burning the very air around her, a paintbrush clenched in her fist like a weapon. It's the only weapon Tess has ever seen her use. Devi whirls as Tess's foot forces a creak out of the floorboard, heaving hot breaths through her flared nostrils. Two canvas paintings stand in front of her, one empty and one not. Like a living thing, the spidery ragdoll creature in the second painting moves, crossing from one frame to the next without touching the space in between, a caged animal pacing the floor of its two dimensional prison. It, also, looks at Tess. 

 _What are you doing here?_ Devi says, wary and suspicious, as if this is the overture to a plot that Tess has been concocting since the very beginning. Tess takes a deep breath. Devi is frighteningly strong, and frothing mad, but she's only one person.

 _I'm leaving,_ Tess says. _You can't keep me here._

The building gives another great heave, shaking the very foundations. Dust rains down from the ceiling as Devi stumbles back, steadying herself on the easel. The creature in the canvas skitters up to another painting on the mantel and crouches there, screw head eyes glittering. Devi snaps back to the painting, where the thing sits hunched in the bow of its own legs, peering down at them. She brandishes the end of the paintbrush at it. _This is your doing, you bitch!_

Tess feels the air at her back shift minutely, like a breath, and knows that Nny has caught up with her. Tess braces herself. They are standing on the verge of a ten car pile up, a Mexican standoff in a burning building. Everything spins on the edge of coin. 

 _Go back downstairs,_ Devi says, without looking back. _Both of you_. _I'll deal with you later._

 _it's too late_ , the Thing in the painting chitters. _it's all over!_

 _No! There's still time!_ Devi shouts back up at it. _I'm still alive aren't I? Aren't I!_

Nny taps Tess on the shoulder.  _May I?_ he says. Silently, Tess steps out of the way. In the weeks that Tess has known him, she has thought of Nny as a kind of pathetic monster, a phantom haunting their shared opera. But watching him stalk out onto the floor, self-possed and smooth, it's clear that there is something _dangerous_ in his piteousness. He is a suicide bomber, a wounded animal that will sink its jaws into its enemy and drag them down into the depths. Nny passes into the light, and the light seems to go out of everything.

Devi watches him, unmoved. _What're you gonna do if you leave here?_ she says sternly, matter-of-fact. _Where are you going to go? You're falling apart at the seams!_

Nny is pulling at his bandages with his teeth again, unwrapping the ragged edges around his wrist. Tess won't look away. She's come too far to look away.

 _You're mine,_ Devi says, quietly now, almost kind. _I made you. No matter where you go, you can't leave me behind._ She reaches out, gently, fingers fluttering through the air like Tess thought she had only dreamed seeing. _I made you,_ she says again.

The table is level with his hip. Nny swipes the palette knife from the strewn art supplies, pinning it clumsily between his hands. He holds it down the center of his palm and pulls his bandage tight around the handle. The blade shines up from his knuckles like a steel talon.

 _You don't want to do this,_ Devi says. She stands there, perfectly still, every inch of her a devastating blunt instrument. She's strong, Tess thinks again, but she's still only one person. 

Johnny bares his teeth and he says, _Give me back my fingers, you fucking witch._

 

 

The palette knife glints in the pit between Devi's breasts like the sword plunged into the dragon's belly. There is a brutal, wet gasp as Johnny pulls back from the polished handle, his ragged bandages snapped and hanging loose at last.

 

 

Tess stands over Devi's body, prone and bubbling with labored breaths. Johnny is curled up shaking on the floor a few feet away, broken with reality for the moment. Tess frowns. What a mess all this is, what an absurd pointless tragedy. Devi's fingers scrabble at the floor, her eyes fixed on something only she can see.

 _I can still finish,_ she gasps, _it's not too late..._

The windows have been boarded up tight, but the gaps between them are dark. Almost preternaturally dark. The quakes are coming faster now, barely dying down between heaves. Tess knows she should run. In any other situation she would run, she doesn't even really know why she hasn't already. She wipes ceiling dust out of her eyes. 

Death is ugly. Tess has now seen enough bodies in various states of death and decomposition to expect ugliness - the smell, which she learned from Dillon, and the mess and the stickiness as bodies start to come apart. Devi looks wretched. Every twitch that wracks her body is like nails on a chalkboard. Still, maybe because Tess has seen so much death that it doesn't scare her anymore, she can't seem to look away.

 _You were never gonna finish it,_ she says. _You know that._ **** ~~~~

At the sound of her voice, Devi startles. For the first time since she hit the ground, her eyes fix on something real. She burns through Tess, still incandescent even as she bleeds out.

 _Tess,_ Devi says. Her fingers tremble as she tries to lift them. It's the same gesture she made to Nny, the shape of God reaching down to Adam. Tess shakes her head sharply. _I'm not yours,_ she says. _You didn't make me._

Devi drops her hand. _What could I make out of you?_ she laughs. She coughs. Pink spit pools in the corner of her mouth. _Ugly... broken bird... You were already perfect_.

Tess can hear a rumble in the ground below them, a low relentless sound that is slowly becoming a roar, shaking the dust on the floor now. She doesn't want to know what is making that sound. She hopes she goes to her grave never knowing. The world behind her is the urgent press of a terror too great to imagine - the world before her is the constellation of the glittering doorknob, Johnny's curled and shaking shoulders, Devi's impossibly green eyes. 

 

 

In the same way that the Masterpiece was unlovely and terrible, Devi's dying body is unlovely and terrible, and so very, very moving. With all the gore and the boredom and the stress, even with all of that, in these last weeks there were shining moments. Moments when Devi looked at her and said,  _you would understand it._ The sad thing is, before Devi, no one had ever looked at her like that.  

She is changed, she realizes. She cannot go back to being the person she was before, the person who closed her jaw and waited for Dillon to cross that line, the person who chased the approval of pretty girls with smoke pouring out of their perfect lips. Devi in no way made her, but Devi has changed her - made her sharper and stronger and maybe more honest, maybe, only time will tell.

 

 

In her memory, Devi explains to Tess how art eats genocide, how human misery is the oil that brings inert powder to glittering life. Tess doesn't know if that's true, or if it even matters, but she knows that Devi believes it. Devi has never lied to either of them, or made excuses for what she's done. She wouldn't see the point.

Johnny loved her because she was on fire with conviction, with purpose that consumed her, and Johnny hated her because, in the process, she had cannibalized him as well. 

 

 

The thing in the canvas is screaming with laughter, its tiny mouth ripped wide open and distorted. The roar coming from the floor below them is deafening now. There is no time for mercy or forgiveness, if mercy or forgiveness were words Tess even understood anymore. Tess won't thank either of them for what they've done. They didn't do it for her.

  

 

Tess is no bleeding heart. Tess steps over Devi's body and reaches for the door. 

  


	3. Her Body is My Coffin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> you're a parasitic psycho filthy creature finger-banging my heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -shout out to chokopoppo for giving me the raccoon bit  
> -[playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL18Z5FjZ7wjNUtivniVvnFmDj-OJOiDnZ)  
> -warning for eye horror

In his wandering exile, Johnny climbs every building he can find, and no one stops him. This city enfolds a lone shade like him with careless ease, disinterested in his profound and grotesque change. 

He is noticed. People draw back from him, as he passes, sometimes crossing the street to avoid him. The eyes that skim over him, that light on him only a moment before skittering uneasily to safer sights - for the first time he is grateful for them. There was a time when every set of a stranger’s eyes on his back was a screw grinding into his temple, a scratchy tag on the back of his neck. Now they remind him that he is alive. He is alive. He is -

midway upon the journey of my life I found myself within a forest dark -

No, no, he knows the shape of that subterranean kingdom, it is ceiling on top of endless ceiling, a series of cells, where he walked alone like a prisoner holding every key but the one key that mattered. It is not a river or a forest. It is the shape of stairs, step after step. It is descent.

Nny looks up. The sky above him is gentle with twilight, a soaring height far beyond him. No matter how he reaches up his hand, the sky is far beyond him. This is not the world of the dead, this is the living earth, with all its filth and glory.

In his wandering exile, he climbs to the top of every building he can find a ladder on, just to watch the sky. The night is better, the clean darkness, the solid mechanical promise of the stars - the perfect celestial sphere - but even in the day he sits on the sun-warm concrete and watches the vault of Heaven. The sun sears his face. He closes his one eye and drinks in the light.

 

 

The toe of his boot, crusted with the remnants of that house, pokes against the corpse of a worm on the concrete. He stares at it for an hour, fascinated by its purple darkness and painful contortion, until the sudden crank of a car engine startles him from his revere. He is standing at the gate of a cemetery, baking in the sunshine. He tastes dust on his tongue.

 

 

He remembers how she moved through the dungeons, colossal and radiant, a god among shades. She called him down from the ladder, where he crouched in the darkness in a bend of knees and elbows, watching her from the shadows. Her back was to him, and in the space before her, the metal fingers of the wicked contraption held a human body. She called him down without turning. _Nny_ , she said, _come help me with this_.

The velcro strap in her hand, the harsh static noise it made as she ripped it free only to pull it tighter, the low pitiful moaning of the creature caught in her web - 

It isn’t remorse that makes him wretch onto his own knees, clinging to a brickwork facade that he can only dimly see beneath the flashback. He never pitied the creatures that she unwound strip by strip, never except once, and he doesn’t expect to begin now. The thing that turns his stomach is the strength with which he even now anticipates her touch, the moment of her shining _Perfect. Thank you._

 

 

Nny bleeds and bleeds and bleeds himself out onto the sidewalk of a street he doesn’t recognize, watching black ichor pour out of his hollow socket, stringing between his fingers, catching the light.

 

 

In her glimmering white armor, Tess offers him a hand to his feet. _Als_ _Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte,_ she says, _fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt._

She glows in the darkness, angelic, with her thousands of blinking eyes and her spinning rings, grand and strange as the dust of Saturn. He takes her hand, but although she pulls him, he is not lifted.

 _If only I was so changed,_ he says to her, as her whirling legion of wings shed feathers over the icy asphalt. _It would be a relief, to live and die as simply as an insect._

Where she touches him, his skin begins to rattle. The chorus of her gaping mouth vibrates down his arm until his teeth are chattering, his whole body is chattering. For a moment he is afraid that she has come to exact vengeance on him for surviving when she did not. He tries to draw back, but she keeps him still in her urgent grip.

 _Die Verwandlung,_ Tess says, and Nny holds himself tightly as his hollow chrysalis of a body begins to shake and shake and shake.

 

 

Nny looks up from tightening the bandages of his hand with his teeth, to find that he knows exactly where he is. This is the bodega where they sell those banana flavored candies he likes. The hand-painted words on the glass are chipping away at the cursive edges, an ancient advertisement for cola, and he presses his hand to the glass with a _thunk_. The wooden handle of a knife he doesn’t remember getting is wound into the bandages.

He wants that candy. God _damn_ he wants that candy. But to enter that doorway? To enter the sleeping jaw of some unknown mouth, the roof that overhangs him like waiting teeth? It would be better, he thinks, to retreat out into the open street, where the sky is visible. But _shit_ he wants that candy.

He reaches out for the doorknob with his slightly more useful hand, the one that isn’t strapped with edged metal. He hears the bell, and then he cannot hear the bell beneath the frenzied shouting.

 

 

These candies taste more like copper wiring than he remembers. Or are those just his weirdly sticky hands.

 

 

In an alleyway somewhere in the city, where the pavement glows with the light of a white sign across the street - Girls Girls Girls - Nny buries his hands in glittering black plastic and wrenches it apart, spilling garbage across the wet concrete. Bones pour out over his hands, glowing clean bones, teeth and metacarpals, clinking and skittering over him like beads, like seeds, plant them in the ground and grow a whole new person -

Gregor Samsa watches Nny with his beautific pale face, both his nervous hands closed over his sample briefcase. He waits obediently as Nny comes to him, hands out, skulls tumbling and parting around his boots. Nny closes his hands around the skinny neck, the pale adams apple bobbing in a swallow. _I’m sorry Mr. Samsa_ , Nny says, _I’m afraid I must kill you again_.

When he looks back down at his feet, there is only garbage spilling out of the rent plastic.

 

 

 _I don’t remember being quite this mad_ , he tells Tess, between attempts to uncap a bottle of cherry soda with mostly his teeth. _I’m almost certain that I used to be better than this._

Tess snorts, perched on a trashcan in the same coat she died in, her fashionable ankh clinking heavy against her chest. _Before mine,_ she says, _whose voice did you used to hear?_

 

 

For a long time - he doesn’t know how long, but he remembers the moment he made the decision to change that - how long it seemed to him then - for a long time, he didn’t dare set foot on the ground floor of the House. That was her place, that was where she made her home. That was where she had held him down and scooped him out, where she sat him shaking and sobbing on the edge of her bed and gently sewed his fingers shut around the broken joints, catgut thread black against the bloody flesh. Where she pushed his hair from his sweaty forehead and told him he was beautiful.

Beautiful, beautiful, _him?_ Beautiful? A skinny nothing, a fucked up nobody, dayjob cashier, him, beautiful - from her mouth, which had almost kissed his only an hour ago, all of her graceful and hard: _beautiful_.  

Everyone wants something from you. Everyone is trying to carve off a little piece of you to keep, to satisfy their dumb animal needs. Johnny knows that his uneasiness with human touch predates this new wild madness. He has always been afraid of touching something empty by accident, the abhorred vacuum, and being siphoned away. He thinks that maybe someone hurt him, taught him a long time ago how to fear this.

She touched him, and Johnny has lived a long time with the uneasy nagging fear, but when she touched him it was as if a light was forcing itself down his throat - as if something underneath her skin was forcing itself into him, filling him up, and making him _more_. When she laid her hand on his cheek, he truly thought that he might burst.

He curses every weak fiber of his being for how badly he still desires the fullness of her touch.

 

 

Johnny was born in - Johnny was born - should he be able to remember this? Is it normal not to be able to remember your own birth? Shouldn’t that be pretty fucking historic, first item on the list even? There is a history that stretches out behind him, but when he tries to touch it, his hand passes right through. A mirage, a refraction of light - he remembers lighting candles together with his mother, he remembers the scuffed white tile of a floor he stared down at as a crowd of children snickered into their sleeves - but each moment slips through his fingers as insubstantial as a recollected dream.

He was already fucked up before she took him and tore him apart, but this is something new even to him.

 

 

 _who am i,_ Nny asks.

 _you are the beginning and the end of your existence,_ the raccoon tells him. _You are something that has never been, and something that always was. you are made of the universe and when you die by fire, you will become everything else._ It starts chewing on his ankle. _do you have any lunch meat in your pockets,_ it asks, _seriously, how about it, i am starving over here._

 

 

He looks up, as a storm threatens heavy and low in the sky, and for a moment the copper-smelling darkness overtakes him. Overlaid like a reflection in a shop window, the basement falls into place around him. She is there - she was there -

 _Do you still think I’m,_ he had said, turning his empty eye away from her. 

They were in the mannequin room, where the skin of dozen strangers was stretched tight over hard plastic bodies. With ruthless deliberate swipes of the box-cutter, she cut away the best features - a nose with a crook in it, a mouth with a white crescent scar, thighs with old burn marks pearlescent and mottled beneath the flickering bulb.

 _Truth is beauty, and beauty is truth,_ Devi said, _that is all you know on earth, and all you need know._

 _Keats,_ he identified, automatically, as his arms started to shake under the stack of legs she’d given him to hold. The warmth was quickly fading from them. _Well that’s a fucking useless platitude. Nobody knows what that even means._

Devi looked up at him. A strand of hair was falling over her cheek, and she blew it away with a little puff, although it fell right back into place. 

 _Truth is decay,_ she said, spreading her hand over the grisly thing on the work table. _Truth is lymph and pain, shit and blood, a mother and child dining on mother and child._ She drew herself up, the box cutter in her hand, and came around to him. She took his face in her hands, coldly analytical, as he struggled under the weight of her spare parts. _You are a work of art._

 _Every sob out of your mouth_ , she told him, _is a beautiful truth_.

 

 

Mr. Samsa deserved better. Better than his bullshit family, better than his ruthless company, better than that filthy room shuttered up in whispered shame. In the library, where no one can tell him he has to leave for another half hour, Nny flips through the pages of _The Metamorphosis_. At his shoulder, Mr. Gregor Samsa shuffles his feet in silent mortification. Nny shushes him.

 

 

 _Show me your hands,_ she said, as he lay crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, too overwhelmed to climb the steps.  _What have you done to my work, Nny?_

 

 

He can feel it itching inside his skull, restless worm that won’t burrow, slimy and thrashing on the concrete. If it were on the sidewalk beneath him, he’d step on it. He’s seen worms dried up and twisted like dark twine, doomed little beasts washed out by the rain, and he pities them, but he never saves them.

 

 

His bandages are soaked with blood. Unhappy with the clotting stickiness, he drops his hand, which sways under the weight of the knife. _Excuse me, madam_ , he says to the shivering woman, _you wouldn’t happen to have a change of bandages on you?_

 _P-please,_ she says, _don’t hurt me._

 _Don’t be silly. Why would I hurt you? You weren’t the one who was talking_ so _loudly about euthanasia._

He bends down to the corpse of the boyfriend and rummages through his pockets for a moment, comes back up with a clean napkin from a fast food company. Good enough. _Hypocrite,_ he says, thumping the body with his boot. _As if there is anything separating you and I but a series of very bad days._

As he pats awkwardly at one hand with the other, he glances back up at the woman. She is watching him, pressed flat against the brick, her heels jabbed into the cracked concrete and teetering slightly. In a moment she will take her chances and bolt - break her heel - tumble to the ground. Inevitable dumb animal panic.

 _Then again,_ he says. _You didn’t exactly stop him, did you?_ The napkin falls forgotten from his grip.

 

 

The first leg punches out of his skull like a knife through a shining pumpkin, a joint unfolding from his eye socket, a spidery limb that digs into his cheek and _pushes_. All its ugly heft squeezes and thrashes against the ruin of his retina, too big to muscle through, tearing gashes in his cheek and socket with its sharp, sharp feet.

 _S-stop,_ he hisses, _it hurts, it_

 

 

 _I’m coming apart_ , he tells Tess, _it’s finally happening, I’m unraveling, I’m turning to salt,_

He pulls his coat tighter around himself, huddling in the damp wool darkness as the rain drizzles from the gutters. His head is pounding, wriggling, full of dying worms.

 _They used to say the Golem couldn’t leave Prague,_ he says. _It would fall back to river mud the moment it left the source of its creation. Am I a man? Was I ever born a man, or am I a monster who only dreamed he was alive?_

 _Is that my fucking coat,_ Tess demands.

 

 

 _what are you doing to_ _me,_ his skull asks him, in a numb panic, as his fingers dig into his arms. Nny is only the forgotten plastic bag that throws itself against the edge of a dumpster, he sees the sky from the perspective of a plastic bag, he loves the sky, he hates the dumpster.

 _your mind is salted_ _earth,_ his body tells him - a shriveled thing wracked with growing pains, Nny pities it vaguely, but he is much more interested in the fifty cents that pin his plastic bag self to the concrete.  _you are a wasteland, you are - uninhabitable - submit, submit, SUBMIT-!_

All at once Nny is neither the plastic bag nor the body. He is the screaming sound in the mouth, the pressure that cracks the throat, he is the pain in the sore fingers as they grind against bandages. He is caught in the system that produces pain, a bug in the codework, a transmission beaming back and forth and back and forth in a hellish loop, unable to complete.

 _you are dust!_ the mouth howls.  _you are nothing!_

"Then I will show you fear," the plastic bag says, "in a handful of dust." 

 

 

 

Salted earth [he is screaming as she scrapes him hollow and clean]

Salted earth [he is watching the sky above the city glitter with stars, an incurable insomniac]

Salted earth [he is dissolving under the dark wind of the void that eats the house, blind, huddled, ready to die]

 

 

She didn't die, he killed her but she didn't die - when the world was whole again she was gone, vanished like a shadow, and the body that she left behind was Tess's - a magician's substitution, a final escape - he stumbled through the door, into the light, and -

He was a little mad before she ever touched him, a little untethered, a little strange. She cut crooked noses from faces and scarred wrists from arms and sewed them all together into a patchwork, took the ugly and built a vision from the pieces. She carved him down different, she hacked off the good parts and left what remained. A driftwood curiosity, a tangled knot cut down to showcase its strangeness; the art is in the clever eye of the one who holds the saw. She took all the parts that the worm would have grown fat and strong on. Someday, he will wonder if in her own way she hadn't saved him.

 

 

This is how it feels to starve. This is how it feels to die. The worm is still made up of him, his neurons and blood, and it is using his wires to transmit its wracked agony. It thrashes inside of him, it cannot eat, there is not enough left of him to feed it. His stomach turns with hunger and nausea. 

 

 

He holds a blade to the throat of a young man, and one of them is shaking, but he cannot say which one.  _Can you hear me_ , the young man says. _Can you feel me?_

The heartbeat against his skin leaps and thumps like a rabbit, but it is whole, it is real, it is alive. He does not wonder who this person is. He has only the presence of mind to be grateful for any sound that is not the death rattle of an unreal thing made up from his own blood and bone. The worm throws itself against the inside of his skull, desperate to escape into April-blooming earth, but it is too weak. Its screams rattle his teeth. He is grateful, he is grateful, he is grateful.

_Deep breath - put your hand over my heart -_

 

 

Long after the worm dies, he can feel its corpse rotting in the low dank water of his cerebral fluid.


End file.
